I left for work in a really good mood yesterday. I stayed in a good mood for breakfast duty…that’s manning the cafeteria with two teachers while K-7 have breakfast…and the morning went pretty well…
Until…I went to lunch…there’s no real going to lunch when you’re a school nurse…you just try to sneak out of your office for a minute…only to be found…sometimes multiple times. Yesterday it went something like this…eat half my lunch…meet with a parent who was bringing some medicine to a child I’d called about earlier…go get the child…meet another parent in the hall bringing a new prescription for her child (think paperwork)…and sending another child home…then go back…eat the rest of your lunch…thinking the worst is behind you…
WRONG…from that point…I saw about 20 kids…in forty minutes…which would have been manageable had one kid walked in my little office every two minutes…but they came in two’s…they came in four’s…I had them sitting in the floor in the hall…at one time there were eight K-2nd graders waiting for me…
And to add chaos to the bedlam…there were high school kids popping in for peppermints on their way back from lunch…I finally hid the jar…but it didn’t matter…it was empty by then…
Bertha…where was Bertha during all of this…I think she was in the classrooms…egging the teachers on to send more kids…she does have a warped sense of humor sometimes…
When all was said and done…and the kids…for the most part…had gone back to class…or home…or somewhere…I whined…not about the kids…but that they all came at once…about being overwhelmed…about losing my cool…losing my compassion…losing my sense of humor…(which I later found in the empty peppermint jar…thankfully)…
In response to my whining…Bertha said life is a lot like swimming under water…you’ve got to learn to hold your breath for a long time…cause you don’t always know when you can come up for air…
So…I’m holding my breath as I type…might as well get ready for today…and all I can say is…send them one at a time…every two minutes…come on…please…
Jane
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